Tuesday, February 23, 2016

An expatriate American friend of mine in the news

I've often said that moral courage is always individual. Moral courage is very often simply possessing the courage and the will, to make moral decisions on one's own, individually.
It's standing on one's own two feet; and that usually requires
sacrifice. Because whenever you make a decision that contradicts public
opinion, or an organizational code or a religion or the attitudes of
your family, friends and neighbors ... you will encounter one of the
greatest fears that keeps people from acting courageously – as
individuals – that fear of being outside the tribe. Peer-pressure is a
force most people cannot successfully resist, and to which they will always submit

A
friend of mine, who immigrated to Canada on 30 August 2005, less than
four weeks before we arrived on 24 September 2005, has been interviewed
for two newspaper articles on Americans who have moved to Canada for
"political reasons":

Laura
said that the editors of the Star article left out most of what she
said about the differences between Canada and the US: "universal health
care, didn't invade Iraq, no death penalty, no abortion law, one of the
first countries to legalize same-sex marriage, a party to the left of
liberal. A functioning democracy. A more secular society."

I love
the reason she gave, in the Star article, for leaving the US for good,
"We were tired of being so angry and frustrated and out of step for so
long." Simple.

Our own reasons for immigrating to Canada are
very much the same, and just as simple ... we no longer felt part of the
tribe. Strangers, suddenly, in a community in which we'd lived for 15
years, in which we built two houses, and had a child. I often say that
moving to Canada was, for me, an antidote to a feeling of helplessness
that I could no longer endure.

I have not met refugees from
America's recent wars, but I have met refugees, older than myself, who
came here during Vietnam and stayed. They are great Canadians and, I
believe, exhibit the best of Americans. And that's what I aspire to be,
during what remains of my own life.

But the editors did include
her statement that "We were tired of being so angry and frustrated and
out of step for so long. It got to the point where someone who is just
an ordinary progressive is feeling like a radical revolutionary."

There
has certainly been a change in attitudes toward Americans who left the
country rather than be (if only silently) complicit in something they
feel is morally indefensible.